Council to collect over 20bn/- next fiscal year

The Mtwara District Council plans to collect over 20bn/- from its various sources in the 2012/2013 financial year, a full council meeting which sat last week heard.

The estimate posts an increase of 20.1 per cent compared to the current budget, whose total estimate collection was18.48bn/-.

Mtwara district executive director Mohamedi Ngwalima revealed this recently when presenting a report on revenue collections and expenditure before the district’s full council that met at Mtwara Teachers’ Training College.

He said a total of 1.5bn/- would be sourced from internal sources, while 793.2m/- would come from the central government in form of subsidies and other sources.

“In the 2012/2013 financial year, we planned to collect a total of 20,725,440,755/-, out of which 10,507.096, 139/- was allocated for paying salaries, 5,747,080,402/- for development projects and 1,980,300,294/- for recurrent expenditure,” said Ngwalima.

He said by the time projected estimates were being tabled in the full council meeting, income estimates for the current fiscal year indicated that, internal collections had already reached 810,910,843/-, about 76.2 per cent against the target of 1.063bn/-.

The DED said that the Council had estimated to collect 18,488,612,854/- in the current financial year, but until February, it had collected only 9,489,405,342/-, representing 51.3 per cent of the target.

“The main challenge is lack of by-laws to enable us charge levies on natural liquefied gas extraction in our areas, and the fact that the cashew market has not been stable," explained the district executive director.

The meeting sat under the chairmanship of Musa Ndazigula, and endorsed the budget estimates.

However, the full council emphasized that executives must be more innovative and careful in expending whatever was collected.

“I congratulate my councillors for endorsing the budget estimates. The main challenge is to ensure that the target is met," said Ndazigula.